Real and unreal news (Notes on attention, fake news and noise #7)

What is the opposite of fake news? Is it real news? What, then, would that mean? It seems important to ask that question, since our fight against fake news also needs to be a fight _for_ something. But this quickly becomes an uncomfortable discussion, as evidenced by how people attack the question. When we discuss what the opposite of fake news is we often end up defending facts – and we inevitably end up quoting senator Moynihan, smugly saying that everyone has a right to their opinions, but not to their facts. This is naturally right, but it ducks the key question of what a fact is, and if it can exist on its own.

Let’s offer an alternative view that is more problematic. In this view we argue that facts can only exist in relationship to each-other. They are intrinsically connected in a web of knowledge and probability, and this web exists in a set of ontological premises that we call reality. Fake news – we could then argue – can exist only because we have lost our sense of a shared reality.

We hint at this when we speak of “a baseline of facts” or similar phrases (this phrase was how Obama referred to the challenge when interviewed by David Letterman recently), but we stop shy off admitting that we ultimately are caught up in a discussion about fractured reality. Our inability to share a reality creates the cracks, the fissures and fragments in which truth disappears.

This view has more troubling implications, and immediately should lead us to also question the term “fake news”, since the implication is clear – something can only be fake if there exists a reality against we can share it. The reason the term “fake news” is almost universally shunned by experts and people analyzing the issue is exactly this: it is used by different people to attack what they don’t like. We see leaders labeling news sources as “fake news” as a way to demarcate against a way to render the world that they reject. So “fake” comes to mean “wrong”.

Here is a key to the challenge we are facing. If we see this clearly – that what we are struggling with is not fake vs real news, but right vs wrong news, we also realize that there are no good solutions for the general problem of what is happening with our public discourse today. What we can find are narrow solutions for specific problems that are well-described (such as actions against deliberately misleading information from parties that deliberately mis-represent themselves), but the general challenge is quite different and much more troubling.

We suffer from a lack of shared reality.

This is interesting from a research standpoint, because it forces to ask the question of how a society constitutes a reality, and how it loses it. Such an investigation would need to touch on things like reality TV, the commodification of journalism (a la Adorno’s view of music – it seems clear that journalism has lost its liturgy). One would need to dig into and understand how truth has splintered and think hard about how our coherence theories of truth allow for this splintering.

It is worthwhile to pause on that point a little: when we understand the truth of a proposition to be its coherence with a system of other propositions, and not correspondence with an underlying ontologically more fundamental level, we open up for several different truths as long as you can imagine a set of coherent systems of propositions built on a few basic propositions – the baseline. What we have discovered in the information society is that the natural size of this necessary baseline is much smaller than we thought. The set of propositions we need to create alternate realities but not seem entirely insane is much smaller than we may have believed. And the cost for creating an alternate reality is sinking as you get more and more access to information as well as the creativity of others engaged in the same enterprise.

There is a risk that we underestimate the collaborative nature of the alternative realities that are crafted around us, the way they are the result of a collective creative effort. Just as we have seen the rise of massive open online courses in education, we have seen the rise of what we could call the massive open online conspiracy theories. They are powered by, and partly created in the same way — with the massive open online role playing games in a nice and interesting middle position. In a sense the unleashed creativity of our collaborative storytelling is what is fracturing reality – our narrative capacity has exploded the last decades.

So back to our question. The dichotomy we are looking at here is not one between fake and real news, or right and wrong news (although we do treat it that way sometimes). It is in a sense a difference between real and unreal news, but with a plurality of unrealities that we struggle to tell apart. There is no Archimedes’ point that allows us to lift the real from the fake, not bedrock foundation, as reality itself has been slowly disassembled over the last couple of decades.

A much more difficult question, then, becomes if we believe that we want a shared reality, or if we ever had one? It is a recurring theme in songs, literature and poetry – the shaky nature of our reality – and the courage needed to face it. In the remarkable song “Right Where It Belongs” this is well expressed by Nine Inch Nails (and remarkably rendered in this remix (we remix reality all the time)):

See the animal in his cage that you builtAre you sure what side you’re on?Better not look him too closely in the eyeAre you sure what side of the glass you are on?See the safety of the life you have builtEverything where it belongsFeel the hollowness inside of your heartAnd it’s all right where it belongs

What if everything around youIsn’t quite as it seems?What if all the world you think you knowIs an elaborate dream?And if you look at your reflectionIs it all you want it to be?What if you could look right through the cracksWould you find yourself find yourself afraid to see?

What if all the world’s inside of your head?Just creations of your ownYour devils and your gods all the living and the deadAnd you really oughta knowYou can live in this illusionYou can choose to believeYou keep looking but you can’t find the onesAre you hiding in the trees?

What if everything around youIsn’t quite as it seems?What if all the world you used to knowIs an elaborate dream?And if you look at your reflectionIs it all you want it to be?What if you could look right through the cracksWould you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?

The central insight in this is one that underlies all of our discussions around information, propaganda, disinformation and misinformation, and that is the role of our identity. We exist – as facts – within the realities we dare to accept and ultimately our flight into alternate realities and shadow worlds is an expression of our relationship to ourselves.

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This is where you find the unfinished thoughts and sketches, this is where we can debate and discuss. This is where the marginal notes, the hunches and investigations end up. This is where I am often wrong. This is where I speak only for myself, and sometimes not even that – I change my mind fairly often.